Since my momentarily "new thing" for the last months in the mountains has been taking photos and stitching them into panoramas, I tried to optimize the process, especially since as with any "new thing", I tend to overdo it. Results on picasa.
The first step was finding a software for creating the panoramas. I was looking for something good, (reasonably) fast, minimum GUI and simple. Autostitch fit most of the profile. Initially, what I did was to pick the photos for each panorama by selecting them in the open files dialog, with Thumbnails view.
Time consuming, from experience some sort of pipelined workflow gives you same results faster. So I started going through all the photos in Picasa first, and in parallel moving the candidates for panoramas into separate folders. After, I started autostitch and did the stitch folder by folder. In the end, moved each panorama into the original folder naming it in such a way to keep the order of the photos when sorted alphabetically by filename, so that I could upload them efficiently to picasa web albums and keep the storyline.
This still involves a lot of repetitive, brainless work, especially in the "After" phase. I started looking for some command line options for autostitch, but unfortunately the developers there didn't consider it. After some browsing on the internet, I found a batch controller for autostitich, created with the exact purpose of allowing automatizations for panoramas creation.
Now all I had to do is write a script for the after phase. Since cygwin is always on my windows installation, bash was the natural choice.
I came up with this not-so-little messy thing:
Script can be downloaded from here.
Now, the "procedure" is:
- download photos from camera to oane folder.
- go through all the photos in Picasa, in paralel moving the ones that should make panoramas to separate folders each with Total Commander (Insert to select, Ctrl+X to cut, F7 to automatically create a folder with the proper name, navigate to it, Ctrl+V to paste, backspace to return and again)
- when done, start autostitch, make the aproppriate settings (in my case, scale to 50%), and open one file from the original root folder (needed because of the way the batch controller works)
- after that, I just start the script in cygterm, and after each photo is generated, I press a key for the script to continue (the preview picture needs to be closed before going to the next panorama).
- the last step for me, is to re-open picasa, where now I have all the photos (non-panoramic) in between with the generated panoramas, crop, make other adjustments, and upload to picasa web albums.
Now, the solution works, and for how long this activity will still be of interest for me, I don't see other major improvements to be done in this direction. There are some serious limitations, most caused by the way autostitch is build and by the fact that the batch controller had to go through the Win32 API in a very "raw" way (search for a window, send button click events etc). I don't like the fact that you have to press one key to move to the next panorama, which prevents you from just "letting it run", maybe completely hidden. Also the not-so-robust behavior can be a problem.
So, if you know any other solutions to this (automatic panoramic pictures creation for multiple panoramas), please let me know. If not, and you had the same problem, maybe this can be useful.
